Going to school for an art degree can be challenging. You spend lots of time drawing, designing, sitting, and wondering if you'll ever sleep again. Here are struggles every art student knows.
Struggle 1: Coming up with Designs
Being an art student, you are expected to come up with deigns for your pieces. Some can be simple and others complex, depending on the assignment. Now coming up with these ideas can tend to be a challenge, other times not so much. Sometimes ideas just keep coming and coming, and then there are days where the ideas seem to have taken a vacation. Once you have an idea and it has been approved by your professor, you get to work.
Struggle 2: Studio Time Outside of Class
Now if you think you can get everything done in a simple two hours and 45 minutes, think again. You will most definitely have to come back after your other classes to finish your assignment. I’m not talking about a mere few hours two days out of the week. I’m talking about coming back and working on the assignment for a few hours every day or every other day.
Struggle 3: Say Goodbye to Sleep
With having to come back and work on your pieces and having to work on other homework for other classes, you might as well say goodbye to a decent amount of sleep. With juggling two or three art classes and three or four gen-eds, there’s going to be multiple all-nighters in a single week.
Struggle 4: Deadlines
With every assignment there are deadlines, but with art deadlines there’s a huge amount of work that needs to be done. And on top of that, your artwork needs to look flawless. If you don’t meet the deadlines then too bad, so sad. Your grades are going to suffer and your professor is going to be disappointed in you, which is something you don’t want.
Struggle 5: Say Goodbye to Your Money
The amount of money that you will spend on supplies is amazing. From paint and brushes to the paper on which you let your creativity flow out, you will be spending an arm and a leg on supplies. The saying about the starving artist is true: What little money you have won't be spent on a cup of coffee from Starbucks or chicken nuggets from McDonalds—it'll be spent at the art store buying the supplies you need.
Struggle 6: The Danger of Losing a Finger or Two
Depending on your major, you may or may not be working with power tools and other machines that can severely injure you. If you don’t pay attention to what you’re doing and take your time, there could be some injuries. Same goes for box cutters and X-Acto knifes. Change your blades regularly because cutting with a dull blade is the most dangerous. If you don’t watch where your fingers are and where your blade, is you could end up with a nasty cut and end up getting stitches.
Struggle 7: Be Comfortable with the Human Body
For drawling, you’ll be expected to do sketches and actual drawings of a nude model either male or female. Now you can’t be a little child about the situation, you have to be mature about the situation and look at the body as piece of art.
Struggle 8: Be Able to Take Criticism
For every assignment you do, you will have it critiqued from your classmates and professor. Now, the feedback won’t always be positive, depending on how well you did your piece. If you put forth the effort and your professor sees it, then the feedback could go either way. It really just depends on your professor.
Struggle 9: Be Able to Talk about Your Work
Being able to talk about your work is a must. You must be able to talk about what you did, how you did it, and what you wanted to accomplish. If you can’t do this, you have a problem. Being able to talk about your work confidently will show others you know what you are doing and that you can do it.
Struggle 10: Stay Committed
Most importantly, stay committed. Even though the nights might get long and pieces might not turn out the way you want them to, just stay committed. There are going to be bad days where you think that everything you do will not be good enough, but stay with it and fight through it, and in the end you’ll be glad you did.
